Tiruvacakam

The Tiruvacakam, attributed to the Tamil Shaiva saint Manikkavacakar and translated by G. U. Pope, published by Clarendon Press in 1900, is a scholarly English translation of one of the foundational devotional texts of Tamil Shaivism, still used in Tamil Shaiva temple worship. Pope was a missionary and Tamil scholar who spent decades on the translation and supplied it with extensive introduction and notes situating the text within Tamil literary and religious history. Its strength is that Pope's own command of Tamil and long immersion in the tradition produced a translation still cited over a century later for want of a widely superseding one. Its limit is that it is a translation made by a Christian missionary scholar in the colonial era, whose framing and word choices reflect that period's scholarly conventions, so a claim resting on fine points of the text's theological meaning benefits from checking against more recent Tamil Shaiva scholarship alongside Pope's translation.